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President Barack Obama's signature on a wall in a health classroom at Southwest High School where he attended a town hall meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Photo by Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images

I was waiting in the “green room” with several other presenters at a national conference several years ago, speaking with other members of the panel. We were invited as keynote speakers, and I was asked to talk about handwriting and the use of pens versus digital technology. I remember one woman in particular, a teacher, who looked at me with disdain when I told her my topic. Her perspective on the whole thing was that kids learn better and faster on a computer, and she strongly implied my thinking was anachronistic, and what did I know anyway, since I’m not an “educator.” I grabbed a bagel and walked away.

“When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris, told the New York Times. “There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain. And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,” he added. “Learning is made easier.”

In a study that followed children in grades two through five, according to the Times, psychologist Virginia Berninger demonstrated that printing, cursive writing, and keyboarding each result in different brain patterns and different end products. Interestingly, when the children tested wrote by hand, they expressed more ideas, and greater neural activation in areas associated with working memory were noted via brain scans.

According to ScienceDaily.com, associate professor Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger's Reading Centre posits something is lost in changing from pen to keyboard. The process of reading and writing involves a number of our senses, she explains, and when writing by hand, our brain receives feedback from our actions along with the sensation of touching a pencil and paper, which is different from the feedback from typing on a keyboard.

"Our bodies are designed to interact with the world which surrounds us. We are living creatures, geared toward using physical objects—be it a book, a keyboard or a pen—to perform certain tasks," Mangen said.

Further, researchers Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrated, in three studies, that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. They showed that while taking more notes can be beneficial, thanks to the speed of a keyboard, laptop note takers’ tendency to “transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.”

So what does this all mean? It means I should have foregone the bagel and expressed what I know for certain: writing by hand is good for humans.

I think writing by hand should be a wave of the future rather than a thing of the past.